Edgar Pieterse
Advisory board member
Co-chair of the AMALI advisory board
Edgar Pieterse is the Founding Director of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town and Provost of the Norman Foster Sustainability Institute. His research and teaching explore urban imaginaries, alternative futures, sustainable urban infrastructure, place-making, public cultures, responsive design, and adaptive governance systems.
He publishes different kinds of texts, and curates exhibitions and difficult conversations about pressing urban problems. He is Consulting Editor for Cityscapes, an international occasional magazine and podcast on urbanism in the global South, which occasionally manifest as exhibitions.
He has published various books, including City Futures (Zed, 2008) and New Urban Worlds (Polity, 2017, with AbdouMaliq Simone), Cities Rethought (Polity, 2024, with Bhan, Parnell and Keith), as well as eight co-edited books dealing with topics related to contemporary urbanism and place-making. His current research is focussed on exploratory work on the tenets of sustainable infrastructure systems in low-income contexts. This focus is tied into a definitional exploration of city-level innovation ecosystems in Africa.
Pieterse also leads the African Mayoral Leadership Initiative as co-chair, and serves on numerous advisory boards of leading urban and scientific institutions in various geographies.